Mobility: Mobility as Capital

Social and territorial structures form intricate relations that transcend a social stratification or spatial focus. Territorial features and geographic displacements are structuring principles for society, as societal features and social change affect the structure and use of territory. Based on the articles examination of the conceptual and theoretical links between spatial and social mobility, they propose a concept that represents a new form of inequality. Termed ‘motility’ this construct describes the potential and actual capacity of goods, information, or people to be mobile both geographically and socially. Three major features of motility—access, competence, and appropriation-0-are introduced. This article focuses on conceptual and theoretical contributions of motility and suggests a number of possible empirical investigations. Motility presents people with an innovative perspective on societal changes without prematurely committing researchers to work within structuralist or postmodern perspectives. More generally, the article proposes to revisit the fluidification debate in the social sciences with a battery of questions that do not begin and end with whether or not society is in flux. Instead, the article introduces a field of research that takes advantage of the insights from competing paradigms in order to reveal the social dynamics and consequences of displacements in geographic and social space.

• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/03091317
• Authors:
  • Kaufmann, Vincent
  • Bergman, Manfred Max
  • Joye, Dominique
• Publication Date: 2004

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Print
• Pagination: pp 745-756
• Serial:
  • International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
  • Volume: 28
  • Issue Number: 4
  • Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
  • ISSN: 0309-1317
  • EISSN: 1468-2427
  • Serial URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-2427

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Empirical methods; Fluidity; Geography; Information systems; Mobility; Research; Social change; Social impacts; Stratification
• Subject Areas: Economics; Geotechnology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Research; Society; I21: Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01000695
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jun 3 2005 1:42PM